Dr Robert Moor FRS

Robert Michael Moor made many important contributions to the science of reproduction and developmental biology. While Robert's experimental findings had direct implications for the understanding of early development, their influence extends to the wider issues of human fertility, stem cells, cloning and animal breeding.

He discovered the role of luteolytic factors in maintaining ovarian cyclicity in ungulates and the mechanisms that underpin the maternal recognition of pregnancy. He established the importance of a number of signalling molecules and proteins required for the healthy maturation - and subsequent fertilisation - of oocytes. He successfully combined this knowledge with techniques he developed for fertilising and growing eggs in vitro, resulting in the production of viable embryos for transfer to surrogate mothers.

Before his retirement, Robert worked on techniques for creating transgenic animals, improving nuclear transplantation and producing stem cells from mammals. His later interests were identifying sequences that act as translational regulators of stored messenger RNAs in oocytes and determining the role of glycoproteins in directing stem cell function in the ovary.

Dr Robert Moor FRS died on 10 March 2021